Let Me Be Frank With You

As I sit here in Panera working on my laptop before hopping a flight home, once again finding it difficult to mind my own business, I am silently engaged in the conversation of the two women sitting next to me. These women apparently met online through an ad to sell weight loss supplements from home.

One of the women is a young sales associate who is overly passionate about the product (she’s the one facing me) – she evidently gets a cut of the sales commissions from each person she recruits. She has a wild look in her eyes as she describes the product and explains a thousand ways to sell the product.

The other lady is her potential recruit. When the recruit gets a rare chance to talk, she talks only about the challenges of being a new mom and how it has impacted her relationship with the baby’s father. The sales lady briefly comments on that and then expertly shifts the focus on her miracle product and how easy it is to sell. Within five minutes I could tell that the sales lady has wasted an incredible amount of time and energy to recruit this woman who is seemingly here to make a new friend rather than start a home-based career in weight loss supplement sales.

If I were a meddler in the affairs of others, I’d pull up a chair and straddle it backwards to share my observations about their meeting. It might be a little off-putting at first for both of them but I think that at the end of the conversation, we’d all walk away feeling good about it: the sales/recruiting lady learning to quickly identify prospects who are not there for the right reasons (also a cheesy ABC’s The Bachelor cliche), the prospect learning how to identify the true motives of strangers she meets on line and, last, but certainly not least, me helping the world (two people at a time) to learn how to effectively communicate in a mutually beneficial manner.

As one who strictly observes, and never interferes (unless it’s an emergency), I think I’ll just sit here and continue to appear as if I’m minding my own business though – the path to least resistance is typically my favorite walk.

By no means would I consider myself to be anything close to what anyone might call a dangerously adventuresome person but I have ridden motorcycles (street and dirt), bungee jumped, earned my SCUBA certification, flown around the country on both private and commercial jets, walked the streets of NYC alone at night, etc.; so I’ve done my share of mildly adventurous things so far in life.

Today’s terribly unfortunate incident in Texas brings to mind one thing that I will NEVER do under my own free will: take a hot air balloon ride.

The romantic idea of gently rising up toward the clouds while quietly humming “Up, up and away…my beautiful balloon” is easily trumped by the reality of being possibly forced into making a quick decision between being burned alive in a wicker basket or jumping out, consciously falling, then hitting the ground and exploding like a hefty bag full of Manhattan clam chowder.

I’m just too indecisive to make that kind of quick decision.

While driving to Jackson recently, I must have repeated the lyric, “I’m goin’ to Jackson. Better comb my hair” about a million times in my head.

The song isn’t true to reality though because when you get there you see that plenty of people have not combed their hair but, because of the song, you expect it to be a place where everyone wears those fancy rodeo cowboy starched shirts with an expertly coiffed Johnny Cash pompadour loaf of hair atop their heads.

I’ll bet there are only a handful of people who still take these lyrics to heart and they are older farmers who smell like mothballs and live on the outskirts of Jackson and get all gussied-up to hit the Golden Corral before a fun filled date night of square dancing at the AmVets hootenanny in downtown Jackson on a Saturday night.

Not everything in the old days was better but I imagine the formal Jackson of yesteryear, where everyone in town combed their hair and worked themselves up in a frenzy where they became hotter than a pepper sprout, was probably much nicer.